Only By Dreaming or Writing: Joan Didionâ€™s The Year of Magical Thinking

In her characteristically sparse yet rich prose, Didionâ€™s book recountsthe year in which she was simultaneously grieving the death of herhusband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne, and coping with thehospitalization and illness of their only daughter. With the currentBroadway staging of Didionâ€™s The Year of Magical Thinking, featuringVanessa Redgrave, the memoir has garnered renewed attention following itsinitial publication in late 2005. Halfway through the year, Didionasks: â€œWas it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what Ithought?â€ This panel seeks papers which address Didionâ€™s text, Redgraveâ€™sperformance of it onstage, or which more broadly explore the conceptof â€œmagical thinkingâ€ as an escape from or construction of reality, atthe intersection of â€œdreaming or writingâ€.

Approaches and connections could include, but are not limited to: deathand dying; grief, mourning, and representation; the physiology of grief;staging and performing grief; public grieving; the stylistics ofbereavement; trauma studies; crisis management; narrative theory;narrative medicine and medical humanities; memory and meaning (or thecollapse of meaning); reconstruction and recovery; memoir andlifewriting. Email submissions preferred; please send 250-500 wordabstracts as MSWord attachments to Dr. Clare Emily Clifford no later thanSeptember 15, 2007 <ccliffor[AT]bsc[DOT]edu>. Accepted panelists must beor become members of NEMLA by November 2007 in order to present at theconference.